Well, about 2 days in now with mine and so far so good. He appears healthy and is actually eating good for me. I had a half shell clam waiting for him in the tank when I put him in. I've also put some NLS pellets and pieces of jumbo mysis in a dish and he seems to like all of it. Hopefully, he keeps doing well. Such awesome looking fish.
Red Sea or Maldives?
Looks nice, just seems a tad thin. You will need to feed him as often as possible to see that he gains weight.
In that article, the Pacific Regal is rounder and have shorter snout, and relatively higher dorsal fins. From the look of the two fish, or should I say fishes, the Pacific Regal seem quite a bit smaller/younger. I wonder if the shape differences seen is a function of size or of genetic.
BTW, human and chimpanzee share 98.8% of the DNA.
Just look at the DNA, these fishes are more different from each other than human and chimps. It is more logical that they should be classify as different species.
As the article mentions, the definitions of species are somewhat inconsistent and kind of go by what was used to define the species.
Classical taxonomy goes largely by physical traits as number of fin rays, scales, lateral line and gill rakes. Color is usually ignored as the preserved samples traditionally used by taxonomists have usually most of their color.
Using mtDNA is definitely a more accurate approach to determine relations and evolutionary distance, but it is still not the primary taxonomic system.
Also, the current 2% criterion may be too rigid or too high.
Still local coloration pattern by themselves are still ignored or, like in this case, just used as clue to start an investigation.
Then there is geographic isolation. The only location where both color forms occur in the wild is the Christmas Island, and it seems there they live in parallel without forming hybrids or a mixed form. The reason for this may be my next point: social structure.
A variable that it is still largely ignored by taxonomy - at least for fish - is social structure.
Here the differences between YBR and BBR may be even more significant than coloration:
BBR live reportedly in a harem structure (Thresher 1982) while YBR form monogamous pairs (Brandl & Bellwood 2014)
I think all methods above have to be combined for the consideration of species status, and all the differences taken together plus the geographic separation may very well warrant a full species recognition of the YBR as
Pygoplites dux.
As for chimp and humans: the gap is actually much wider than the 2.2% due to the fact that humans have DNA strands that chimpanzees don't have. Currently the gap is 6%:
Human-Chimp Gene Gap Widens from Tally of Duplicate Genes
The more interesting question is if the chimpanzee really form a different genus (
P a n) or rather belong as well to the genus
h o m o - with all the legal strings attached (human rights, etc.)
(BTW: since when is the genus name of the human species a dirty word? Taxonomically every single human being is a "
h o m o", so how can it be offensive?)
Sorry about your loss. Did you get it locally from a store or order it from some place?
Local store
